


Laguz

by Dream Mender (Llewcie)



Series: Rune Cycle [1]
Category: The Dresden Files (TV), The Dresden Files - All Media Types
Genre: Claiming, M/M, Magic, Possession
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-10
Updated: 2016-01-10
Packaged: 2018-05-13 00:55:50
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,220
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5688394
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Llewcie/pseuds/Dream%20Mender
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Harry brings something home from a crime scene he didn’t expect.  Fortunately, Bob is used to Harry trailing in all sorts of magical garbage.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Laguz

**Author's Note:**

> Laguz is a rune of water… of healing, sometimes, and of the privacy of commune… well, imagine you and a few friends out in the dark night, skinny dipping in a lake. Would you want a stranger there, in your private pool? Nah, didn’t think so.

“She was just a kid, Bob.” Harry had his hands outspread, not very far apart, and they were bloodied, the knuckles cracked open. “Just a little bitty girl. He didn’t have to—the m-magic was already g-gone, Bob. Circle b-broke.” He collapsed on the floor, and what clattered down after him shocked Bob more than even Harry’s bruised and torn body and clothes—his hockey stick, or what was left of it, was in splinters, and that burned out and scorched. Bob reached out to him-- reached out-- stupidly, pointlessly… and his hand swiped right through Harry’s shaking shoulder. Harry was too far gone even to notice.

“Harry… Harry, get up. You can’t sleep in the foyer. Get up, get yourself cleaned up. Are you injured?” Bob summoned his most stark lecture-voice—the one that he knew would snap Harry’s legs into motion no matter if the house was burning down or if twenty-five Rockettes were dancing on the furniture in various states of undress. Harry started to move. Bob ached to carry him. It was a torturous path for them both to the bathroom. 

Once there, Harry seemed to have expended all of his energy. He pressed his back up against the wall and slid down it, looking broken and miserable. In his arm was tucked something blue and fuzzy, and suddenly Bob didn’t want to know what it was—didn’t want to see. But for Harry’s sake, he started in again, with his gentlest, softest tone. “Harry, what’s that?” When Harry just blinked at him, Bob prodded, “Tucked in your arm?”

Harry scowled furiously, trying to hold back tears. “Teddy bear, Bob. Oh, God, it was so senseless…” And he broke, weeping, silently, softly bowed, while Bob could do nothing but watch. He stroked a hand near Harry’s head and back, murmuring soft noises, and cursed his inability to touch. As bad as it had been when Harry was a child, somehow this was worse. Bob didn’t quite know why, and his precise, questing mind shied away from prodding that particular dark corner too closely. 

“Get out of these torn clothes, Harry. Wash yourself, come on.” Working only with his voice, he slowly urged Harry out of his jacket, his torn t-shirt and jeans. Bob surveyed the damage—it looked to be mostly psychological. Harry’s lean body was pale and mottled with bruises. In a few places this skin was torn—a scrape on his back where he must have been dragged across something, and an arresting and bloody tear across his collarbone that Bob hoped wouldn’t need stitches. Despite Bob’s protests, though, Harry carried the little blue teddy bear with him into the shower. Soon, steam masked the glass, and Bob couldn’t see him anymore. He tucked his forehead into his own hand, and waited, rubbing his temples, desperately wanting to do anything but that to which he was bound. His own skin was clammy with displeasure and fretfulness—his fingertips cold. “This curse has never been more of one…” he muttered.

But what could be done? Indeed, nothing could be done. 

“Bob? You there?”

Bob looked to the glass door, where he saw the shadowy shape of his dear friend on the floor of the bathtub. He was there in an instant, and then, barely hesitating, he crossed through the glass barrier and entered into the bath, crouching down to be at a level with Harry. “Yes, Harry. I’m here.” His dear friend did not look well—looked, in fact, decidedly worse than then he had stepped into the shower. His olive skin was pale and leached of color, even in the heat of the shower, and dark circles ringed his eyes. The bruises were livid and ugly. Bob would have traded his soul to be able to cast a decent healing spell at the moment. He would have traded his soul for a lot of things…

“You’ve seen bad things, right, Bob?” Harry was staring at the wall, the water coursing over him, washing away the dirt and the blood. He leaned his head back and relaxed back into the spray, eyes squeezed shut. Bob blinked at the long-limbed body stretched out before him, seeming suddenly all too like an offering. He swallowed, trying not to stare… what was the question?

“I-I have, Harry.” The moment came back to him. Fine time to get distracted, Hrothbert. “I’ve seen bad things. You saw a little girl killed tonight.”

Harry’s face contorted in a grimace. He nodded. “Warlock. Ritual—I didn’t understand it. Morgan—he was there, too. He didn’t understand. We were too late. We broke the circle in time, but the guy—he didn’t have to kill her but he did anyway. He was smiling, Bob. And… Morgan took him out right there, but she was dead.” He clutched the little bear to his chest. Bob stared at it, and something that should have bothered him immediately upon seeing it reared its fuzzy blue head up now. 

“Harry, why do you have that toy? What made you pick it up?”

Harry blinked an unfocused eye at him. His posture was curiously relaxed, which alarmed Bob even more. “Dunno. I wanted to remember her. She was holding it. She… she wanted…” He struggled, unable to spit out the next words. Bob, having already pieced the rest of it together, recognized it much more quickly that Harry did—he was fighting a geas. An icy chill took hold of him and wouldn’t let go.

“She wanted you to have it, Harry?” 

Harry’s eyes widened slightly. He looked down at the bear. “She’s all alone, Bob.”

Bob leaned forward in the bath. “Harry! Listen to me. You are under a geas. The girl was not human. It was a demon. The warlock was trying to kill the demon. The demon has ensorcelled you. You must put down the toy. Harry, put down the toy.” Harry nodded at him, painfully. A flicker of something behind his eyes—recognition flared, and Bob nodded encouragingly. 

Harry grimaced again, clearly fighting something. His muscles worked under his skin, his hand with the fuzzy bit of fluff squeezed in his strong fingers extended, passing through Bob’s essence and back again. “Bob… someone ins-side me.” Fury flared up in Bob’s breast, and a terrible fear. He clawed at the space where Harry’s hand was, snapping at the air that he could not affect, snarling in rage and frustration. 

“Fight it, Harry. You are mine-- mine, do you hear me? You belong to me, body and soul and heart, every inch of you, every breath, every waking moment, and every dream. Fight it.”

“Yours…” Harry panted, eyes focusing on Bob, who nodded.

“Mine. Focus, Harry. You will drop the teddy bear. I command it. Drop the bear.” Bob’s voice was low, steady, and absolutely ruthless. He hadn’t used this voice since he had commanded his own apprentices, and they had done whatever he had asked. Anything he had asked. Harry’s eyes rolled back into his head, and his hand shook. 

“Bob…” he said thickly. “Since… when do you give… orders?” Damn Harry, so stubborn—something Bob found endearing most any other time… Harry bit his tongue, and it began to bleed, out of his mouth and all over his bare shoulders and chest. Bob frantically told himself that the rushing water made it look worse than it actually was, and that the pain would be good. If Bob had been about to slap him… but then, if Bob could do that, he would have just taken the treacherous little furry time bomb and reduced it to ash in an eye blink. He looked severely at Harry. 

“Orders? Do you think I’m some military commander? Do you think you can end this contract we have? Get some type of honorable discharge after six years of service, Harry? Oh, no. You belong to me—do you understand what that means?” Harry blinked, squinting, as if he had a terrible headache, and Bob’s eyes flicked to the deathgrip on the teddy. Harry had managed to loosen a finger. Good boy. “That’s right,” he continued. “This possession isn’t possible, because there is no room for anyone else inside you but me, Harry. Are you listening? You and I, we are joined—intimately, totally. I exist within you, and you… you exist because of me.” 

Harry nodded again, his only coherent response, his eyes hazing now. Bob allowed his gaze to drag down over Harry’s exposed body… all the times that he had seen and had not allowed himself the heartbreaking pointlessness of want, and now he had to make this play when he was terrified—it wasn’t right. But, oh, the wanting was there. He swallowed his fear, and reached for all the years of repressed longing. His voice dropped to a low murmur, mixing in with the fall of the shower water. 

“I may not have been able to touch you before now, Harry, but I have spent the last twenty five years watching you grow from a boy to a man, and every moment of that time that I have been with you, I have taught you, shaped you, made you into the Wizard. But you have become the man on your own. Do you think that now that you are lying underneath me, compliant and gorgeous and within my reach, that I am going to hand you over to the first hussy that thinks she wants a taste? Oh, no.” Bob leaned in closer, and was astonished and relieved, and admittedly, deeply aroused, that Harry’s narrow hips rolled upwards slightly to meet him. “Harry Dresden, you are going to drop that blighted bear, and you are going to come upstairs with me, and I am going to make good on every dream that you’ve ever had. Do you understand me?”

In an agony of convulsions, the younger man under him writhed slowly in a parody of orgasm, crossing in and out of Bob’s essence in firelight trails. Harry’s tortured voice whispered out above the cooling stream of water. “Get out…of me… you little bitch.” He slowly rose to a seated position, and Bob moved along with him, as if they were joined perfectly six inches apart. His voice shaking, Harry slowly opened his eyes. “Bob… if you’re… fucking with me… I’m gonna use your skull as a… doorstop.” Bob’s eyes rounded hugely, and with a last trembling shake, Harry slammed the little blue teddy into the floor of the bathtub, and it ignited in brilliant purple-black fire, disappearing into an inky black smudge and the screaming of a pissed-off demon.

They both stared shakily at it for a moment, and then Bob blinked. “Well, good thing you have a steel bathtub.” He lifted a wry eyebrow to Harry, who was watching him wearily. With a chuff of unsteady laughter, Harry folded in half and bowed back over, allowing the spray of the shower to spatter the long lines of his back.

“Would you just explain, Bob, what the hell just happened?” His voice was muffled and a little petulant. Bob could hardly blame him. Hell of a day.

“The demon must have jumped into the toy, and then sent a ge—“

“Not that.” Harry’s eyes snapped up, dark and unreadable. “The other part, where you made love to me just then.” Bob blinked, startled by his tone. “You said that you could touch me? Except that you can’t.” To illustrate his point, Harry waved a hand through Bob’s chest, fracturing his essence. Bob winced backwards slightly—he could feel Harry’s emotional state quite clearly through the contact, and it was a turmoil of emotion—desire and betrayal being the foremost two. 

“Except that I can,” Bob said gently. “You’ve just forgotten, Harry Dresden, that once we shared a communal consciousness.” He pursed his lips in thought, as Harry fell silent. “It was lost, when you ceased to trust me. But… I have felt the healing of the breach. Perhaps, it is possible now.”

Harry was shaking his head. “Perhaps what? What’s possible, Bob?”

Bob just gave him a soft smile—the one he knew Harry was such a sucker for. “Come upstairs. When you’re ready.” And then he flickered out in a trail of red-gold fire, leaving Harry staring after him, bemused and shivering. His gaze dropped to the blackened ash that had been the temporary housing for the demon… Bob had saved him from becoming the permanent home. All with just his voice. The thought of being touched by him… Harry shivered, and certain parts of his anatomy prickled a little more alertly. And odd memories tugged at him—half-remembered dreams. There was something—something that he should be able to remember. Harry kneeled and then stood, knowing that he was missing something huge. Knowing that the answer was waiting upstairs for him. 

He sighed, reaching for the soap in the now-cold water. It was Bob. Bob, who he had known longer than anyone else in his life. His best… his only true friend, who he could tell anything to, and who knew everything there was to know about Harry Dresden, including all the embarrassing adolescent stuff he would rather have forgotten. 

So why did it feel like his stomach hosting a butterfly convention?


End file.
